Your Quick Guide to Getting Started with LinkedIn Ads

linkedin ads feat

If you’re on the fence about whether to use LinkedIn Ads, you’ve come to the right place. While it is true that most business owners stick to using Google or Facebook to advertise their services, that’s actually to your advantage.

The truth is that LinkedIn is a severely underutilized platform with great potential. This gives you a massive advantage over your competitors.

LinkedIn is often overlooked since it’s not a typical social network like Facebook.

But, in recent years, LinkedIn ads have become a valuable asset for advertising professional services and products, and especially so with B2B offerings. This is because LinkedIn allows you to more narrowly target the audience you want to reach based on more business-centric criteria. Thus, you are able to increase the potential for acquiring new business leads and turning them into paying customers and clients.

Furthermore, LinkedIn has become a place where opinion-makers offer their insights into their respective fields of interest, establishing themselves as thought leaders.

The so-called “Influencers initiative” has made LinkedIn even more alluring to business professionals who want to network and communicate with their peers. So, if you decide to use LinkedIn Ads, you can be sure that your ads will find an eager audience.  

Before running LinkedIn Ads, it’s of paramount importance to know who you’re going after

Here’s how to get started with LinkedIn Ads

If you’re looking to get started with LinkedIn ads, we’ve got you covered. Read on to find out exactly how to run your first successful LinkedIn ad campaign.

Define your target audience, create a persona

Before running an ad, it’s important to know who you’re going after. Take some time to define your demographics and ideal customers. Create a customer persona and aim to target that persona.

Is he or she a manager? Are they in upper or middle management? What sector are they involved in (e.g. technology, sales, marketing)? Defining these criteria will increase your chances of converting your audience into customers.

Acquaint yourself with the Campaign Manager

The first thing you need to do is create a LinkedIn account, or if you have one already, just go to the Campaign Manager. This is where you will create, manage, and optimize your LinkedIn ads and campaigns.

The Campaign Manager provides you with reports and displays data about your ad. It gives you a breakdown of the rate of clicks, shares, likes, and comments that your campaigns generate.

It also gives you an overview of the demographics of your audiences. You can see their average age, sex, as well as the countries they come from.

LinkedIn allows you to target audiences on a deeper level than, for example, Facebook. You can target people by professional skills and interests, job title, employer, industry, etc.

You can target people by professional skills and interests, job title, employer, industry etc.

Design a modern landing page for each campaign

When people think of ads, they only consider the actual ad copy and title. Many people forget that the landing page is, in fact, part of the ad campaign.

When people click your ad, it should lead them to a landing page full of useful and specific information about the advertised service.

Make sure to create a landing page that explains to customers how the advertised product or service will improve their lives.

Unfortunately, when people hear the phrase “landing pages”, they think of cheesy colorful pages made by “internet marketers” pushing a magical weight loss solution.

In reality, though, a landing page is simply the page where the person lands after clicking your ad. All the Fortune 500 companies use landing pages, and those are quite professional and serious in appearance.

The same is true for those who offer B2B services and products. And, it is true for all your favorite SAAS solutions and any software products that you use. They probably convinced you to use their service with a well-put-together landing page.

Note that last phrase in there – “well put together”. This should be true for your landing page as well. It needs to answer all of the main questions about your product and service. It needs to do this in a clear and concise way, listing every feature and option.

Start by creating your ads

A successful ad often contains a short and catchy headline and an image that attracts attention.

The headline of the ad should be short and catchy. It should get straight to the point and be effective.

The ad should, of course, link to the landing page you have created for your advertised product or service. Advertisers often make the mistake of leading the potential customer to their homepage. Don’t make the same mistake.

For each campaign, LinkedIn allows you to create up to 15 ad variations. Test different headlines, images, and landing page combinations to find the perfect one for you.

Test different headlines, images, and landing page combinations to find the perfect one for you.

Set your ad budget

The cost of your LinkedIn ads depends on your targeting criteria. In the US, it’s not unusual to see CPC starting at $2 and going up to $4 or $5 per click.

LinkedIn gives you two ways to pay for advertising

The first one is Cost Per Click (CPC), it charges you each time someone clicks your ad. The bidding range differs depending on the competition, i.e. how many advertisers run a similar campaign to yours. Thus, your bid will need to be higher if the number of similar advertisers is also high.

The other option is Pay Per 1000 Impressions (CPM). This means that you will be charged each time your ad is viewed by 1000 (different) people.

If your goal is conversions, then CPC is likely your best option. If you want to increase the visibility of your business, then CPM should be your preferred choice. Either way, think about what you want to achieve with your ad and then decide the budgeting route.

You can also test your bids. Try running a couple of ads and see what budgeting option provides you with more bang for your buck.

Launch your ad

Once you have set your budget, it is time to run the ad. Click the Launch Campaign button and off you go. LinkedIn almost always reviews the ads manually, so don’t be alarmed if the ad is not immediately online.

Track and analyze the success of your ad

So your ad is finally running. This is where the real work starts. It’s time to determine if it’s driving traffic to your website or landing page. Thus, you will need to do some digging to find out more.

Tracking the way customers interact with your ad can give you a sense of what is working and what is not. Is your ad generating new customers? If it’s not, even though that was your goal all along, it’s time to switch things up.

For example, your ad may be targeting executive level professionals in the technology sector. But, if most of the conversions are from leads from companies in the restaurant business, stop targeting the technology sector.

Tracking the way customers interact with your ad can give you a sense of what is working and what you should change.

Consider hiring professionals to help

If social media advertising seems overwhelming to you at the moment, don’t worry. This is perfectly normal, as there is a bit of a learning curve to it. If, however, you want to save time, there are professionals out there that can offer you a guiding hand.

At DemandZEN, we will do our best to help you get leads and convert leads into customers. We have expertise in all the digital marketing techniques that bring qualified leads. We’ve applied each of them many times throughout years of collaboration with businesses just like yours.

If you let us help, we can do all of the hard work. We’ll design and optimize your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns for you, and we can also design beautiful and effective landing pages for your products.

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